Happy new year to everyone.New year, new poll. Lossy/lossless polls are a tradition here in HA.org. The first one started few weeks after the site was founded by Dibrom. As explained in last year's poll I think that polls should be rationalized in order to compare more easily the choices of HA members. The 2007 general poll was created exactly one year ago and got 921 voters ; I hope this one will last one full year¹ as well and will reach the 1000!

I made small changes in the poll structure:• WMA and WMA Pro are now one unique poll choice (they got less than 1% of total votes last year and I needed a free row to make the other changes possible)• WavPack lossy was added• LossyWAV + lossless whcih appeared this year was also added• other lossy format and I don't use lossless AT ALL! are split• I reordered the list according to the 2007 popularity (TAK before OptimFROG)• Apple Lossless was accidentally removed

9000 new persons are registered on hydrogenaudio's forums since last poll. I hope that many of them will answer to this new poll. In advance, thank you for your vote.

To finish, a very big thank you to houyhnhnm who offered us a pretty complete synthesis of HA Polls since the beginning, here:

I am VERY interested in the future of TAK. Once it goes open source and gets a little more software support it may well replace FLAC for me. I switched this year from MP3 to AAC. I use an ipod, my wife uses an ipod, all my friends and family use ipods. I had alot of playback problems with VBR Lame MP3 files on the ipods, so I have switched to ABR AAC.

Since its a "ripping" poll as well, you should have added an option for ripping software of choice.

I voted:- MP3: for compatibility.- WavPack: because Bryant is a nice guy from San Francisco and I like the foobar2000 icon.- one file per track: for no special reason other than I never had a problem with that.

Interesting how Wavpack lost its users to FLAC. The current poll seems to show that this trend continues. Or is it because of TAK?

My guess is that growing hardware support for FLAC caused this and maybe even FLAC's new feature of embedding images. Now that there's a new competitor out there (TAK), it may also draw some specific users to it, those who always look out for the most efficient codec.

WavPack - I like its efficiency, it has a "full" feature set (except embedded image functionality isn't widely supported with players yet, tho it works with fb2k which is most important), it's free software.

One file per CD - I don't play lossless on devices that need track-based audio files, when I need track-based files I transcode to lossy anyway using fb2k. And I don't like non-compliant cue sheets, also one file per disc is easier to manage when having a large music library on HD.

My lossy format of choice is MP3 for universal compatibility -- my hardware players are old and relatively featureless, yet nonetheless they suffice for my purposes. That said, the overwhelming majority of my rips are lossless, I only encode to LAME 3.97 --vbr-new -v4 on-demand.

Lossless-wise, all my music is in WavPack High, sometimes having used -x3, sometimes having used -x6 with no real consistency (and feel no need to enforce it). Once TAK will support seeking without seektables like WavPack, I'll consider a migration to that format.

A possible reason why WavPack could've lost "market share" in the previous year is that its hardware support still lags behind that of FLAC, so users looking for hardware support that are more likely to use FLAC anyway. That leaves users looking for higher compression (than FLAC) but decent flexibility (more flexible than OptimFROG or Monkey's Audio) using WavPack (like me), yet these are the users most likely to switch to TAK eventually.

Moved over the years, from Monkeys Audio to Wavpack and now am using TAK p5m with one file per disc for my lossless archive.Use MP3 (lame 3.86 beta V4) as my primary lossy format for its universal compatibility.Anish

For lossy I've been using MP3 so far - because it will play on my old DAPs. I imagine this will change to vorbis in the new year because I am thinking about buying a new DAP with vorbis compatibility, and I love the gapless nature of vorbis files.

For lossless I have been using FLAC so far, because of the wide acceptance of them. I love that it's open source, too. It's entirely possible I might try TAK and WavPack both this year, just out of curiosity, and one of them might replace my FLACs... but you never know.

For lossy and lossless I use single image and cuesheet, because so many albums I have are gapless.

I think 2008 is likely going to be a year with alot of transition, with the new formats that are emerging (new hybrid lossy/lossless) and the other promising lossy and lossless types that are appearing and being developed. It'll be interesting to see how this year compares to 2009.

-MP3 LAME 3.98b6 -V2 (I switched back from AAC for device support, ubiquity, etc.)-WavPack (For efficiency reasons at the time I started archiving)-One file per disc with cuesheet or chapters (This makes it easy to recreate CDs and maintains proper gaps)

Most of my lossy catalog is still MPC, but I voted for Vorbis because if I was to encode more lossy files I would probably use Vorbis. I'm about as confident in Vorbis's quality as I am in MPC's quality now and it is more likely to be supported.

FLAC simply because it is most widely supported, open source, and "good enough" as far as compression goes. TAK certainly looks interesting for the future.

Since I Only use PC+Foobar (No DAP here. Don't ever need one) Compatibility is not my concerned. So I use Vorbis lancer build q-6 for lossy for highest quality with giving bitrate and speed. (q-4 is good enough but a just a peace of mind.) and TAK 5 for lossless.The new version usually has compression (sometime significantly with quieter music) better than APE high while still decoding a lot faster and usable not like APE more than "high" which is damn slow.

In ripping mode however, I rip them using image+cue AND use foobar to split them in to individual tracks. It's a bit tedious work but I can have backup of my disk (image cue file) and convenient of using individual tracks at the same time. If I ever need to burn it back to CD I just merge individual tracks together using foobar+image cue file to burn.